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Moseley Chimes
April 2008
This Lent Bishop David encouraged us all to develop our prayer lives and journeys. At St Mary’s and St Anne’s we responded by having a sermon series at our morning services on different ways of praying including exploring silence, the Jesus Prayer and how to pray through the day. We also began a prayer group on Monday evenings where we explored some of these themes in further depth, praying with icons, images, music and even food. But prayer is not only for Lent and now as we are in the Easter season; it is a very good time to reflect, renewed as a community, on how we might develop our prayer lives even further. This is particularly important as both churches have given priority, our raison d’être, to becoming a praying community.
But you might ask is this, really what we want to do? We might think why bother? What good does prayer do? Surely we want action rather than all these prayers, for surely it is activity, not prayers, that will move our church on and equip us for the 21st century?
The Christian church though has always, in the past, been built on prayer, in fact it cannot exist without it, for without prayer we cease to worship God, and we cease to be a church. Jesus’s life was based on prayer (Matt 14:23, Luke 9:18). His ministry began following a time of extended prayer and self examination in the wilderness (Luke 4:1-11), and it ended following the heartfelt emotive prayer in Gethsamane (Matt 26:36-46) and the final cry to God on the cross (Mark 15:34). If, as a church, we are seeking to follow the example of Jesus, then we need to offer our lives, church, and community in prayer before God. But you might say, there are no measurable results of prayer, so what good does it do? Surely the crux of Jesus’s ministry was what he did, his wonderful teaching, his miracles, his ability to transform the world and bring transformative justice. True, all these aspects of his ministry were wonderful and unique, but without prayer Jesus’s ministry would not have existed at all, for prayer was the basis for everything that Jesus did.
It is all very well Jesus praying it might be said, but we are only humans, how can we pray? The truth is it was because of prayer that the church grew from an obscure group in Palestine to the religion with the most numbers in the world. Acts 2:41 says that after one sermon ‘about 3000 persons were added’. Yet the key is not to be seduced by the numbers for the next verse says, ‘they devoted themselves to the apostles’ teaching and fellowship, to the breaking of the bread and the prayers. Prayer gives us strength, courage and is the basis to inspire all action, and without prayer we simply cannot do anything fruitfully.
But how should we pray you might ask? The bible shows us many ways of praying. We might want to sometimes follow the example of Jesus praying on top of a mountain alone (Matt 14:23), other times we want to pray together as a church (Acts 12:5).
The bible teaches us to pray at all times (Rom 12:12; 1 Thes 5:17), and to be persistent in prayer (Col 4:2). For it is in prayer that we grow together. Jesus himself prayed that we might be one (John 17:31), for it is through prayer that we can be honest together and move on as a real community acknowledging where things are not good (Jas 5:16) and seeing where God is guiding us in the future. There are many times for us to pray for each other at our churches in the months ahead, come let us follow Jesus and become a praying community together.